France

THE mist which has long obscured the immediate future of French politics is at last beginning to lift, at least in one respect. Barring ill health — always possible in a man of seventy-four — it now seems fairly certain that Charles de Gaulle will run for re-election as President of the Republic next December. Thus will be completed the first of the three tasks the General has set himself on the domestic front in the name of “national renovation.” It will only remain for him to assure the transformation of the Senate from a parliamentary chamber representative of France’s rural elements into a body which reflects the country’s professional interests, and to oversee the triumphal re-election, in December, 1967, of an absolute Gaullist majority in the National Assembly.

One factor which could shatter this long-term plan would be a drastic deterioration in the recession which recently hit French industry. In this respect, 1964 proved a mixed blessing to France. It saw the triumph of the stabilization program which was introduced in September of 1963: the rise in the cost of living, which had averaged 5 percent a year since 1959, was reduced to only 2 percent, and there was an improvement in the French balance of trade, which has been unfavorable since 1962. But the price paid for this stabilization has been a recession, particularly noticeable in the textile industry and in an overall decline of 7 percent in automobile sales, with the nationalized Renault works, for example, selling 528,000 cars and trucks last year as compared with 668,000 in 1963.

In December De Gaulle’s spirits were buoyed by the decisive breakthrough on uniform grain prices which saved the Common Market from going on the rocks. This was interpreted as a victory for Gaullist determination, and it was combined with the deteriorating situation in South Vietnam, which seemed to confirm the General’s most somber prophecies for that strife-torn land.

France’s Premier

Georges Pompidou’s steady rise has been one of the more extraordinary phenomena of the Fifth Republic. He is the only French civilian within living memory who has had to face the National Assembly without parliamentary or, in fact, electoral experience of any kind. His maiden speech as Premier on April 26, 1962, was such a lackluster performance that there was general agreement among the old parliamentary hands that he would be lucky to last six months. Instead, he has ridden out three years.

Pompidou’s parliamentary success owes much to the situation he found when he took over. His predecessor, Michel Debré, had to rule with an unstable majority, which began to fall apart as it became clear that De Gaulle’s real Algerian policy was almost exactly the opposite of what many of his supporters had thought it was. Pompidou, on the other hand, has had the support of an absolute majority of some 240 deputies (out of 477), who have remained loyal to the government through the hottest parliamentary crises.

The key to Pompidou’s success, however, lies less in his handling of the National Assembly than in his handling of De Gaulle. The real leader of the Gaullist majority in the Assembly is once again Debré, who, after his upset defeat in the elections of 1962, crept back in a carefully rigged by-election staged for his benefit in May, 1963, in the conveniently remote island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. Notwithstanding this belated comeback, Debré remains an outsider, for he holds no ministerial post and does not attend Cabinet sessions in the Elysée Palace, where real policy is made. And this, in the present French context, is crucial.

It is precisely in his smooth and increasingly expert handling of Cabinet sessions that Pompidou has made his mark. Where Debré, his predecessor, was peppery and incisive, Pompidou is suave and diplomatic. With a finesse born of years of discreet work for the banking house of the Rothschilds, he has developed a psychological insight into the character of De Gaulle, which Debré, the lawyer ever ready to argue a brief, has never possessed.

Pompidou rarely argues with De Gaulle. His tactic is to spare De Gaulle all unnecessary decisionmaking except in fundamentals and on issues which are regarded as of paramount importance. He has become a past master at running interference for De Gaulle, cutting short a long-winded minister when he senses that the General’s patience is beginning to wear thin, deferring thorny issues to later study when excessive disagreement looms, and generally steering Cabinet discussions in such a way that the answer to any particular problem emerges gradually through a kind of consensus, thus relieving De Gaulle of the onus of settling the issue himself.

This is the way De Gaulle likes it; for contrary to the myth which has grown up about him, the General in private is not the imperious arbitrator which his public intransigence has led so many to believe. His opinion is sovereign, dictatorial, and, like the Pope’s, unchallengeable in those fields which he regards as his particular domain, notably foreign and military affairs. But for the rest, he is more than content to exercise a policy of laissez-faire.

In the nature of things, Pompidou’s strong points are back-room and chancellery qualities, which do not by themselves equip a politician to face the rough-and-tumble of the public world. As a debater he has undoubtedly made progress, but the ascendancy he has achieved over the Assembly is largely due to its having degenerated into a thoroughly docile body, whose debates are no longer enlivened by the caustic wit of a Georges Bidault, the razor-sharp repartee of a Pierre Mendés-France, the forensic subtleties of an Edgar Faure. The blander form of political persuasion which Pompidou has perfected is doubtless more in keeping with the present temper of the French people. But whether it would suffice to carry him through to a clear-cut victory in a presidential election remains a moot point.

De Gaulle’s opposition

The situation resembles a poker game and is complicated by the fact that not all of the possible players have yet laid down their cards or even entered the game. So far three opposition figures have announced their candidacy: Gaston Defferre, the Socialist mayor of Marseilles; a middle-of-the-road senator, André Cornu; and a fiery exPétainist minister and lawyer, JeanLouis Tixier-Vignancour, whose heated outbursts occasionally take violent form — as on last October 22, when he grappled with a prosecution witness in a Lyons lawcourt.

The two imponderables are Antoine Pinay and the French Communist Party. Pinay, though he is | only a year younger than De Gaulle, has remained extraordinarily active for a man of his age, allowing his supporters to believe that he may be persuaded to run if the General bows out. As for the Communist Party, no one yet knows whether it has an ace or a joker up its sleeve or how it will choose to play it.

Defferre’s campaign has conspicuously failed to get off the ground — which is precisely what some of the wise old birds of the Fourth Republic, like Guy Mollet and Pierre Mendés-France, predicted from the start. Defferre’s conscious efforts to exploit Madison Avenue techniques have been crippled all along by the unrelenting hostility of the state-controlled radio and television, which has done everything to keep him off the screen as completely as possible. Though a new charter for it was voted through last autumn in answer to a rising wave of protests, the new O.R.T.F. (Office de la Radio-Télévision FranÇhise) shows merely a change of label for the same sour old wine.

Defferre’s chances

As a Socialist who nonetheless owns a yacht, Defferre has been more hindered than helped by his party affiliation. The French Socialists are at present in the throes of a bitter inner conflict which has pretty well paralyzed them. The party now has two heads, one of them being Defferre, its official candidate for the presidency, the other Guy Mollet, who as secretary-general continues to control the party apparatus, though not its policymaking board.

Mollet has never taken kindly to Defferre’s candidacy. His own choice, based on the belief that a middle-of-the-roader stands a far better chance than a left-winger, was Maurice Faure, the head of the Radical Socialists, who rose to be Deputy Foreign Minister in Mollet’s 1956 government when he was only thirty-four. Mollet’s hope was to engineer a coalition of “pro-European” parties behind Faure, which, with the blessing of Jean Monnet and others, might stand a chance of confronting the patriotic rhetoric of Gaullist ultranationalists with the inherent dynamism of the European idea. His plan was shattered when Defferre suddenly announced his candidacy in October of 1963. Mollet has never forgiven his fellow Socialist’s presumption and has all but openly plotted for his downfall.

Defferre himself seems to harbor few illusions about his chances of defeating De Gaulle in an open election. In February of last year he got his party to accept a longrange political program aimed at building up an image of the Socialist Party as determined to look forward ; but the slogan coined to make the point — “Horizon ‘8O” —suggested to skeptical observers that not until 1980 is the Socialist Party likely to return to power in France.

In any case, with several other contenders already in the field, it is possible that when the real slugging begins, Defferre will no longer be in the melee at all. He held his position as mayor of Marseilles as a result of a precarious coalition of non-Communist center parties, and he knows quite well that he does not stand a chance against De Gaulle unless he receives support from the Communists, who still control around 20 percent of the national vote, compared with 12 to 13 percent for the Socialists. But Communist support is something Defferre has steadfastly eschewed.

The Communist dilemma

The Communists, for their part, have not made clear whether they would eventually be willing to support a Socialist candidate in order to make the most of an uncertain situation. Premature Communist support for Defferre would be more embarrassing than useful to both, for it would resurrect the old bogey of the Front Populaire and would permit the Gaullist UNR to pose as France’s only salvation against a rising Red tide. On the other hand, the Communists have it in their power, simply by putting up a candidate of their own, who might get close to 20 percent of the vote, to siphon off enough ballots from Defferre to ensure his defeat and De Gaulle’s re-election.

It is here that internal considerations have their impact in the foreign field. The Kremlin has every reason to want to keep De Gaulle in power, for no one has proved more adept in systematically disrupting the entire NATO structure. De Gaulle, who knows this as well as the Kremlin does, has long used his privileged position to blackmail the Communist Party at home.

In the improbable case that the French Communist Party comes out strongly for Defferre, De Gaulle can make the long-awaited trip to Moscow which, for reasons of diplomatic protocol, he has owed the Soviet Union since Khrushchev’s visit to France in March ol 1960. Nothing could embarrass France’s Communist leaders more than to have France’s President cordially received in Moscow. About one million Communists are estimated to have voted for De Gaulle in the presidential election of 1958.

The groundwork for a Gaullist grand tour has already been laid. Last July, Ion Gheorghe Maurer and Alexander Birladeanu, respectively Premier and Deputy Premier of Rumania, made an official visit to Paris. This visit opened extensive trade negotiations, which were completed in December and were officially signed in February in Bucharest. An even more ambitious trade agreement was signed between France and the Soviet Union in November, providing, among other things, for long-term credit exceeding the five-year limit laid down in the Bern agreements. Then Koca Popović, Yugoslavia’s Foreign Minister, made an official visit to Paris, the first such visit made by a Yugoslav since the conclusion of the Algerian war; and he was followed by Václav David, the Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia, and two months later by Janos Peter, the Foreign Minister of Hungary.

De Gaulle and the Germans

The Gaullist plan to penetrate Eastern Europe, economically as well as diplomatically, is a delicate operation. To the extent that it tends to weaken Moscow’s hold over its satellites, it is not popular in the Kremlin. Nor does it particularly endear De Gaulle to the Germans, who, though they have preceded the French along the same road by opening trade offices in Warsaw and Prague, are always apprehensive lest any French effort to improve relations with the East be undertaken at the expense of the reunification of Germany.

De Gaulle himself contributed to these apprehensions in 1959 when he publicly opposed any revision of the Oder-Neisse border, though that did not prevent him from later entering into a formal alliance with the Bonn Republic in January of 1963. De Gaulle’s lukewarmness to German reunification was never a problem while Konrad Adenauer was Chancellor of West Germany. Adenauer was a Rhineland Catholic who harbored a deep-seated distrust for Lutherans of Prussia and Pomerania, whose reabsorption into the West German body politic would have put an abrupt end to the supremacy of his own Christian Democratic Party.

But Ludwig Erhard, his successor, and even more, Gerhard Schroeder, the new German Foreign Minister, are quite different personalities, and both have shown increasing sensitivity to the undercurrent of feeling in favor of reunification, which the German Liberals have recently been exploiting.

The built-in strains and stresses in the Franco-German alliance have been exacerbated by the personal animosity which has sprung up between Schroeder and his French opposite number, the suave, seldomruffled Foreign Minister, Maurice Couve de Murville. Shortly before the semiannual meeting of NATO foreign ministers last December, Couve’s diplomatic bonhomie was put to a severe test by Schroeder, who, at the end of a session with his French, British, and American colleagues, summoned a few of the more influential German correspondents in Paris and told them that in the just-concluded discussion over Germany’s reunification, all but one of the Big Four foreign ministers had favored reopening the question with the Soviet Union.

Though Schroeder did not actually say so, he intimated that the lone negative had come from France. The Quai d’Orsay promptly issued a sharp denial, indicating that none of the powers other than West Germany was particularly keen on reopening the question at present.

United Europe?

The distinct chill which descended on Franco-Russian relations after France signed the FrancoGerman pact in January of 1963 and later refused to sign the test-ban treaty has only gradually warmed during the last twelve months on the tacit understanding, reiterated by De Gaulle in his conversations with Sergei Vinogradov, the Russian ambassador in Paris, that Paris would not press for the reunification of Germany in the near future.

In retrospect it now seems clear that since the rapprochement of East and West in the exalted name of a “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals” was De Gaulle’s longdistance aim all along, to begin by snubbing Britain and deliberately cajoling Germany was a strange way to go about it; all the more so since this aim forms an inherent part of the Grand Design for liberating the Old World from the “hegemony” of the New.

The one power in Western Europe which might conceivably be able, for geographic and historical reasons, to pursue a policy of relative independence toward the United States is Britain; the country least able to do so is West Germany, whose only effective bulwark against the Red Army is the American Strategic Air Force. Hitching the French chariot to Germany and simultaneously ditching Britain, as De Gaulle did in January of 1963, was bound, under the circumstances, to pile up trouble for the future.